Brilliant Portfolio Leading Milky Way at Island in the Sky in Canyonlands National Park | Ep 130

Brendon and Aaron finally get a chance to get back out there with their cameras and celebrate 3-years of doing Milky Way Photography on a 4-Night Trip that of course…didn’t entirely go to plan. Beginning this trip with a cancellation as clouds ruined our chances of getting a Milky Way out at Royce Bair Milky Way Butte, we are forced to make a 5-hour detour drive to Richfield, Utah for a print that was as tall as Aaron! This print was a gift to Canyon Country Lodge out in Escalante and it was huge! Barely fit in the pickup we rented! Knowing time is precious, we take off from Escalante that same night and begin the trek to Moab with only one stop off at an amazing Martian-like landscape. The area is one we have been many times before but we did NOT know about this spot to capture from. We have actually passed the road that leads to it several times and missed out on many opportunities for a great image! Having used our skills in Google Earth scouting and matching terrain from an image up with terrain we are familiar with we discovered its location and worked to get our first image out there. The drive through the night was going to be worth it! We hoped. After sharing a nightmare sleeping condition story, we spend the rest of the podcast on being in Moab and our amazing morning at Island in the sky. Classic what went well and what could have been better, we break down the successes and failures are Island in the Sky and Aaron shares that he may have just captured his second or first best image of all time! As far as Milky Way Photography goes, this image might be his best depending on who you ask. Aaron has his favorite but this new shot is easily his second. It’s amazing how we can capture an amazing portfolio image and not even recognize it until you post-process it! We also go into the merits of extremely long exposures to bring in your landscape foreground. When you hear advice from Royce Bair and Wayne Pinkston, who both have amazing bodies of work in Milky Way Photography, you want to copy them anyway you can to get your own great images. But to this point, I was not doing long exposures for the foreground despite seeing it in their photography and hearing it here on the podcast. But in this circumstance - Island in the Sky - a nice long exposure bringing out all the foreground detail was benefit instead of a way to light up distractions in your composition. Long exposed foregrounds is NOT something you should do in every Milky Way Image. So we talk about our recommendations on when it IS going to work for you. See the Photog Adventure behind the scenes story of the images we captured that morning here on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/dYf9QIaEhbY Watch the Milky Way Wednesday where Aaron breaks down even more details from that trip and shows how he processed the sky panorama and ground panorama stitching them together with Photoshop: https://youtu.be/tqefUkIFBdU